


Fishboy

by SylphofScript



Category: Teeth - Hannah Moskowitz
Genre: All the warnings from the book apply, M/M, They aren't reimagined here but just to be safe, just in case
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-04-27
Packaged: 2018-10-24 12:07:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10741398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylphofScript/pseuds/SylphofScript
Summary: I needed a sequel, so I wrote one myself.(I still need a sequel. Please, I need a sequel.)





	Fishboy

On the eve of my eighteenth birthday, I tell my parents I’m leaving. Mom’s busy wresting Dylan into a coat and Dad’s humming while he fries up Dylan’s dinner, so they don’t hear me right away. I can tell the exact moment the words have meaning to them; Dad’s humming abruptly stops and he turns to stare at me in surprise, and Mom freezes in her conquest to warm Dylan before he runs out on the beach without his shoes, Rudy-style. The fish has done wonders for him over the years, and without a sign of lung transplants on the horizon, his diet doesn’t change. It doesn’t stop him from being a seven-year-old terror.

“I’m leaving, too!” Dylan protests. He wrenches his arm out of Mom’s grip and runs to the door, expecting Mom to give chase. When she doesn’t, he looks at me like “What the fuck’s their problem?” and I can only answer with, “Me. I’m leaving, Dyl.”

“Okay,” he says. I don’t think he understands, because he bounces on his feet excitedly. “So am I. Hannah’s waiting for me by the dock.”

Dylan’s friend, a girl the same age as him who had come to the island with cancer when treatments weren’t an option anymore. My heart aches to know they’ll never leave the island like I’m about to. At least not until medicine kicks its ass into gear and figures out how to save them.

“You didn’t apply for college,” Dad finally says. His voice is filled with pure disbelief. They probably don’t think I’m serious. I’ve only ever been this serious in my life a few times before.

“I’m not going to college.”

“Then where are you going?”

“Away.”

“Rudy, you can’t just go away,” Mom says, the first thing she’s said the entire time.

“I’m not just going away. I’m going that way. Out there.” I point out the door, out to the ocean, across its length into the unknown abyss of darkness the world creates. I’m going out there, and I don’t know when I’ll be coming back. If I ever will.

I don’t think I will.

Mom looks at me like I’m insane, like I’m about to rip off my clothes and go assault the people at the marina with my nudity. It might be the most attention she’s given me since Dyl got sick years ago. But maybe she’s right. Maybe I am insane.

I haven’t stopped thinking about him since he left.

“There’s nothing _out there_ , Rudy.”

“Mom, the sea doesn’t just expand into nothingness and end with the edge of the world. There are other countries out there. We’re not alone.”

“You’re going to another country?” Dylan asks. He’s finally caught on, and the expression on his face makes me wish he had stayed oblivious. Maybe I should have told my parents once Dylan was asleep. Too late now.

Dylan rushes up to me and slams his body into mine, his arms wrapping around me like they could keep me from going. “You can’t go! Rudy, you can’t go!”

A sharp smell assaults my nose before I can say anything. Dad curses and pulls the pan off the stove. The fish. Magical fish can burn?

“I’ll be back.” I try to gently pry Dylan off my torso. I’m going to Hell for those words. I’m going to Hell and I’m going to burn or freeze or whatever it is you do when you go to Hell for lying to your sick little brother. “I just need to go.”

“We can’t stop you,” Dad says. He looks like he’s going to shatter into pieces. “You’re eighteen.”

“He’s seventeen,” Mom says.

“He’s eighteen tomorrow.”

I hate what I’m doing to my family, but I have to do this. I have to try. I do nothing but think about him, dream about him, wonder about him while I’m out catching his brothers and sisters. It’s an obsession, ugly and clinging, just like him. I wonder if this is what sailors feel like in movies and books. Like they can’t let go once they’ve seen their mermaid.

Merman.

Dylan’s off and he’s crying now. His chest hints at a gargle, but he hasn’t had an episode in over a year, and his lungs no longer need to have the crap knocked out. Well, not as often. Hardly ever. He can run for short periods of time and do most things on his own like all seven-year-olds want to do.

He can’t leave. It’ll all regress back to square one. He’ll never be able to leave.

But I can.

-

I pack up fish I’d been saving from the good days when we’d come home with more than we knew what to do with, hidden by the old dock in the sand where they couldn’t get stolen. They’re as fresh as the day I buried them, because magic fish don’t go bad. I stuff a bag with things I think I’ll need, like money I’d earned fishing, clothes for different weather, and a passport that I’d ordered forever ago, when I first planned on doing this. It all barely fits into my backpack, but I count it as good enough, and the afternoon of my birthday I say goodbye to my family at the dock where the boat comes in.

I wasn’t going to steal a boat like Teeth had, I had no real experience as a sailor and I’d die at sea if I tried. I needed an airport, and there were no airports here. Dylan and Dad cry, Mom tries to tell me I was still welcome to stay here with them, and I tell them the same lie I had fed them yesterday. I’ll be back. I’ll be back.

Maybe I would. I didn’t actually know. I didn’t know anything.

Diana shows up just before I walk onto the boat and gives me a kiss on the cheek. “For luck,” she says, and then she’s gone as suddenly as she had come and I’m waving to my family as I leave the place I never wanted to be for the last time.

All this, in search of a fishboy. My fishboy. My obsession.

I don’t know how the fuck I’m going to do any of this, but I’ve already wasted too much time not trying.

 -

The first place I try is colder than I thought, and I end up buying a jacket right off the tarmac. The fucking _tarmac_ , because this airport is so fucking small. Maybe I’ve started in the wrong area. There aren’t even many roads here.

There are plenty of sailors and fishermen, though, so I guess I’ve started off strong. I’ll need to take another plane if I want to get anywhere else in the country, though, which is just fantastic.

The shit I’m going to do for this guy. I really am insane.

I learn quickly that I need a translator to get done what I want done, since English isn't the language of choice for these men, and find one in the shape of a guy a few years older than me with skin that makes me look pale. Which, I am pretty fucking pale.

Hell, maybe I’m the ghost now.

He’s nice enough, but I can’t pronounce his name worth shit, so I’m embarrassed pretty much as soon as I open my mouth. It doesn’t stop there, not once I have to explain I’m looking for a mythical creature. It takes a lot of asking, a lot of embarrassment, and I fail at my first four air stops along the country, but eventually I find myself nearly crying in relief when one of the fishermen knows exactly what I’m talking about when I—and by I, I mean my translator—ask if they’ve seen a really fucking ugly guy with a fish tail in a boat.

They’ve seen him. He made it here.

I start actually crying. That’s what that guy has done to me. I cry in relief because he made it to a giant island in the fucking ocean and _just might_ _not_ be dead.

I can’t even explain what this does to me. It’s so fucking ridiculous.

That’s basically what my life has become since I let him go. Ridiculous. Insane. Stupid. I thought I had accepted it, but now that the fisherman is looking at me like he doesn’t know what the fuck to do with me and my translator looks like he just wants to get the hell away after getting paid, I realize maybe I haven’t quite accepted the mess my stupid fishboy had turned me into.

Just … Teeth, okay? Fucking Teeth.

 -

It takes me months. _Months_. Slow, nail-biting months. But I follow the sparse sightings along the edge of Greenland and into Iceland, and then to one side of England, where the sightings grow as the population increases. I find his boat somewhere in Northern Ireland, being held but not used by a superstitious farmer, and realize I must be in the right place. Finally.

I know if I don’t find him, my heart will break.

I know if I do find him, my heart will shatter.

I’m not sure which I’ll be able to survive, but turning back now stopped being an option ten sightings ago.

I write letters home to Mom and Dad and Dyl. I know they won’t get there until months after I’ve sent them, but I figure it’s the least I can do after how long I’ve been gone. Without them, they’d probably think I’m dead. I tell them not to write back because I’m always moving around. Nothing would ever get to me in time.

It’s a lonely amount of months I spend looking. I don’t bother counting them. Counting them would just make me feel things, and I already feel way too much for what I’m doing right now. If I feel more I’ll probably burst into a mess of tears and gore and insanity, which no one wants to see.

Teeth is my focus. Fishboy is out there, and I just have to find the right place to look.

 -

You know what I’ve developed a strong detestation for? Islands.

Wow, I fucking hate islands. They can all sink into the sea and never show their face again for all I care. Ireland has too many islands, and most of them end up bringing me nothing but a headache. I’ve probably only gone through four or five of them at this point, but it feels like I’ve been hopping along them for centuries. If I never see another island again, I’ll be the happiest man alive.

At least they speak English on these islands. Now I only look stupid to one party member at a time, which does wonders for my ego.

This specific island, with a name I couldn’t repeat if I even tried, because there are just so many fucking islands, is the island I finally get another whiff of where I need to be. Like the islands, I don’t know what number fisherman slash farmer slash sailor I’m on when I’m told he’s been sighted, but there’s a big enough distance between this one and the last one that had told me he’d been seen that my heart nearly flips out of my chest when I’m told. I nearly tackle the guy in a hug, but he looks too much like a murderer, so I keep my hands to myself.

“ _Really_ ugly, right?” I say, because I don’t want to be sent looking for a pretty merman. My merman is ugly as fuck, and I like him that way.

The fisherman frowns. “Sure, lad. Thing’s off that’a way. Next dock, hm?”

Okay, my heart does actually flip out of my chest this time. Big summersault, right into this guy’s murder hands.

“He’s _here_?” I say. I sound like I’ve decided to reenter puberty, which is not a good sound. It’s a dying dolphin sort of sound. Not sexy in the slightest.

The fisherman has had enough of me at this point, and he nods and waves me away. I’m too busy swallowing my lungs to protest. I run in the direction he pointed and nearly wipe out on a rock when my foot finds it.

Ireland has too many rocks. And grass, which hides the rocks for unsuspecting foreigners like me to kill themselves on. Maybe it’s a form of entertainment for the locals. There’s not much else to do around here.

 -

The dock’s empty when I get there. It’s probably a good thing, because as soon as I find it I drop my bag and pull out one of my fish and a knife, and immediately start cutting it up into chunks to feed into the water at the end.

Yeah, I know this seems like a bad idea, but I figure it’s the best way to get Teeth to know it’s me. Make him angry enough that he has to come out of the water and drown me himself.

Okay, not my best plan. It’s a really bad plan, and I as the creator understand this. But, you know what? I don’t care. It’s the best thing I’ve got and it was a good idea when I was first making it. I didn’t have help with any of this, and there’s only so much a guy can do when he’s hunting down something that shouldn’t even exist.

Shit, okay, and might not even be here, and maybe I’m just wasting this fish, but I’ve got six more in my bag and this is the closest sighting I’ve gotten in my entire journey. This might even be the pinnacle of my search, this one sighting and this one island and these seven fish, one of which is now floating in chunks along the water. I throw the skin and head and bones in for good measure, but they don’t look as cool floating in the water.

It’s something. And something is more than nothing.

 -

I decide to stretch my fish out, not waste them all on one sighting. I plan on staying on this specific island at least a few more days than I already have, in the only inn on the island. I buy a sweater from the innkeeper, mostly because I’m tired of wearing the jacket I got in Greenland. It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever owned and I kind of love it. It itches a lot, and it’s heavy, but it’s warm.

It’s what I’m wearing the day I decide to sacrifice the second half of my second fish to the water at the end of same dock, and the collar of it scratches against my neck uncomfortably as I work. There’s a couple standing at the other end behind me, watching me, and I can’t tell if they’re locals or foreigners like me. I want them to fuck off and leave me to my work, but they can’t see the glares I’m throwing over my shoulder at them, and I’m too worried about pissing off someone who lives here to yell at them to go away. So I return to my fish, hoping they’ll figure out I don’t want them there in time.

Then, I see something flash.

It’s just out of the corner of my eye, but I have good vision. I know I saw something. I look up and stare where I think I saw it, and I wait.

Then I see it again.

It’s shiny enough to reflect some of the dreary lighting that Ireland offers and it’s big. It’s fin-shaped. It’s _big_.

It’s not a fucking fish. There’s no way it’s a fucking fish.

I _know_ that tail. And I know I’ve found him.

I’ve found him.

With a startled cry, I throw myself into the water. My jeans and heavy sweater soak instantly with cold water, logging me down into the depths of the ocean, but I can’t think of anything but getting my arms around him.

_I’ve found him._

“ _Teeth!_ ” I scream. “ _Teeth!_ ”

My arms move through the water sluggishly. I look crazy, I look insane and wet at the end of the old dock, screaming into the ocean. I know I didn’t hallucinate. I’d know that tail anywhere. I’d know _him_.

“Teeth, you bastard!” I screech, gargling some of the saltwater as it empties into my mouth. I spit it back out. “It’s me! I saw you! I _saw you_!”

I’m panicking. I’m fucking panicking and hallucinating and I’ve gone absolutely insane. Mom was right. I’m a fucking nutcase. This was a bad idea, there was never any reason to leave. I was never going to find him. He was never out here, he probably never made it out of the marina. The missing boat probably crashed and he drowned out at sea. He was never out here and I was nuts to think I’d be able to find him.

Now I’m wet and soggy and cold and fucking nuts.

Fuck fuck fuck _fuck_ _fuck_.

I start to cry. There’s no one around to see me now, the two had left me to my screaming. I hope they don’t get the police. I don’t want to have to tell my parents I got arrested in Ireland for yelling into the ocean.

My tears streak warmly down my face, mixing oddly with the freezing cold of the water at my chin. I start to shiver. And sob. And shiver.

“You’re a fucking idiot. I can’t save you with fish here if you let go of all your heat again. They only have the stupidest of stupid fish here. And you just fucking threw away the good stuff. You’re so stupid.”

Oh.

I turn, and there he is. I’m so surprised that he actually came, that he was actually there and I saw him, that I gape at him like the idiot he just accused me of being. I don’t even stop the saltwater from flowing into my mouth. He grins back at me, looking so different but so much the same to the fishboy I lost. I throw myself at him, done thinking about anything except _he’s back he’s here he’s back he’s back he’s back_.

“Back? I didn’t come back. Did you hit your head? Do you have a con… concus…”

“Concussion?” I choke. Where the fuck did he learn a word like that? And the accent, where’s that accent coming from? He didn’t have that back home. I laugh, bury my face against his slimy neck, feeling him bob with my weight in the water. His hair tangles in my fingers and I realize he’s grown it out. He laughs with me. His throat vibrates against my lips and I swallow.

I want to bottle his laugh up and take it with me wherever I go. I want to never leave him again. I want to scrape my nails along his scaly chest and pull him to me harder than I can right now in this thick-as-shit sweater that keeps me from feeling anything but cold. I want everything to do with him. I’ve wanted it for so long.

At sixteen, these thoughts used to confuse me. Scare me. I’ve had two years to mull them over and drive myself batshit with acceptance for them. This is what I wanted all along. This.

I want it so badly.

I can’t believe I found him.

Please, please don’t wake up.

“Jesus, you’re so heavy.” Teeth squirms under me, and even though I can’t stop thinking about that, it doesn’t do anything to me. The water’s way too cold for that. “What the fuck? Why are you so heavy?”

“Sweater,” I say. I just want to hold him.

“Take it off.”

“No. Too cold.”

I feel Teeth turn his head to look at me, and I must _look_ cold, because he starts to really struggle. “Get out of the water! I can’t save you, arsehole. You’re such a fucking idiot, get out!”

Arsehole. I’m laughing and I can’t stop. He must be listening to the locals talking. He’s picked up their words and their accent and it’s so funny I’m wheezing into his jaw with cold and laughter. I hear him gnash his teeth in that way he does.

It’s dark, I realize stupidly late. Too dark to really see him when I finally let him go. I can see hints of him, like shadows through a white cloth but the other way around. He practically glows, but in a way that’s too indistinguishable to my eyes. It’s too damn dark here, the town’s too rural. There are no lights.

“Where are you sleeping?” Teeth asks. His hands are on my shoulders. His touch still keeps me just warm enough to not freeze to death. That wasn’t something I wanted to repeat.

“Inn,” I say. The only inn on the island. They only had five rooms.

“Go,” he says, gently. I notice his voice is a little different from the last time I heard him talk. Or maybe I just can’t remember his voice right because I remember the screaming best of all. “Go and come back. I live here now, this is my island. I’m king of this island and it’s mine. Come back.”

 -

I come back. I’ve decided on a windbreaker and a pair of sweatpants that can easily be rolled up as my wardrobe for the day and I sit on the edge of the pier with my feet in the freezing water while I wait. It doesn’t take long.

“I haven’t flirted with any human boys,” Teeth says, appearing like he’d been in front of me the entire time. Maybe he had. He was always better at hiding than we gave him credit for.

“What?”

“You told me not to flirt with any other human boys.” Teeth’s hands are on my feet, sticking his fingers between my toes. He gives my ankle a sharp tug, but I don’t move. I’m too levered on the pier for him to yank me in. “So I didn’t.”

“Oh,” I say. “Thanks.”

“There aren’t really boys to flirt with here, anyway. Everyone’s old and they all talk funny. It’s all … whatever.” He still has trouble with his words. I guess two years wasn’t enough to flesh out his vocabulary much.

“That’s an accent. I heard you speak in the accent before.”

“It sounds funny.”

I kick the foot he’s not playing with, splashing him in the face. He doesn’t recoil, just splashes me back. I flinch from the chill of the water.

“You came for me,” Teeth says quietly. His fingers are wrapped securely around the heel of my left foot. “You remembered me.”

“Of course I did. You’re hard to forget.”

Teeth looks up at me, and then pulls away, and for the first time I can really _see_ him.

He doesn’t quite look like my fishboy, not the one I said goodbye to forever ago. He’s still skinny as shit, but his scales aren’t ragged and peeling from his chest. They gleam in the weak sunlight, winking at me in mockery. _You can’t have this,_ they say. Fuck, I want it. I’m so easy. I’ve always been so easy.

His arms aren’t toothpicks, his chest has definition. With a shock of horror that took two years to manifest, I realize the fight with those fishermen had done so much more to Teeth than just what I had thought I understood. He is so healthy now, it hurts to look at.

“Like what you see?” he says. He winks, a hand proudly touching his chest. The webbing between his fingers looks the same. I reach out for his hand, but end up with my fingers brushing against a wet lock stuck to his neck.

“You grew your hair out.”

“Yeah. I liked it long. Don’t care if I look like a girl.”

“You look like a boy.”

“Even with my hair long?”

“Even with your hair long.”

“Shit,” he says, grinning. I grin back. Then, I realize what about his smile is so different.

“Your teeth,” I say in shock.

“Wow, Rudy, I thought you were smart. Yeah, I’m Teeth. I’m always Teeth.”

“No.” I shake my head, trying not to laugh at the misunderstanding. “Your teeth.” I point to my teeth to show what I mean. “They’re different.”

“Oh!” He opens his mouth wide then snaps it shut. “Yeah, they’re growing back! It’s taking a really long time, but they’re coming back.”

“They don’t look like your old teeth.” I can’t stop staring now that I’ve noticed them. They’re not the sharp, flimsy things they used to be. I can’t see through them anymore.

“Yeah,” Teeth says, poking at a tooth. “I think it’s the food they feed me. I feel a lot better than I ever used to.”

He looks a lot better than he ever used to. I know this because I can’t stop fucking looking at him. I started sitting on my hands just to stop myself from trying to touch him.

“You think the food is doing something to you?” I say, because I have to say something. Teeth looks out at the water with a look that makes me think he’s not really listening.

“I think the Enki aren’t the only magical things. Other things are magical.”

I don’t know exactly what he means by that, but it sparks something like hope in my stomach. I can’t really figure out why.

 -

I write a new letter to my parents once I’ve decided what I want to do. I tell them where I am and what I plan on doing, but I leave out the details I’d kept from them since the beginning. I don’t think they’d believe me even I tried to explain any of it.

The first time I write the letter, I make the mistake of bringing it to the end of the dock with me. Teeth ends up smearing it with slime and water before I can finish getting all the words down, his finger tracing each of my letters as he tries to sound the word out.

“I haven’t had time to practice my reading!” he says when I stop him, his voice going all screechy. I almost reel with nostalgia, it’s been such a long time since I’ve heard him do that. “You were supposed to teach me to read. Teach me to read!”

I don’t stop him a second time, because he’s right. I was supposed to teach him and I never held up my end of the bargain. I can rewrite the letter back in my room at the inn.

Teeth’s mouth silently works as he follows a few lines behind my writing, and I lose my train of thought twice before giving up and just watching him.

“Do you like it here?” I say, interrupting one of the words he’s sounding out. He’s annoyed by it, and he splashes me a little. I kick him, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“Yeah,” he says. He traces the word he was working on with his finger again. “The food’s kind of gross, but it’s better than anchovies. I miss catfish.”  
Oh. They’ve been feeding him. He said that before.

They know about him?

“I’m not the only weird thing here!” Teeth says excitedly when I ask. I can’t imagine what he means by that, but I think I don’t want to know. A fishboy was enough for one lifetime. “There are others, I’ve never met them but the old lady, the one that lives in that house over that way, she tells me about them. She feeds them like she feeds me. She speaks _really_ funny. It’s fucking great.”

“What?” I say. “How? They have magical fish here, too?”

“No, stupid! Not the fish. It’s in those things, the brown things. The fish here are so stupid.”

I can’t understand what he’s talking about. Brown things?

“The brown things.” Teeth mimes a shape. It just looks like he’s holding air. “They’re crunchy and shit. Taste like dirt but in a good way.”

Does he fucking mean—

“Potatoes? Are you talking about potatoes?” He’s not fucking talking about potatoes. That’s a bad cliché. Magic Irish potatoes? You have got to be kidding me.

“Whatever,” he says. Which means I’m right.

Wow. Fucking magic potatoes. The world is weird.

“Is that why you look like this?”

“Like what?” Teeth pulls back and frowns at me. “I look like me.”

“You look healthier. A lot healthier. Is it the magic spuds?”

He tilts his head. Maybe I shouldn’t have swapped up names for the potatoes. I wasn’t really thinking. I’ve forgotten how to talk to someone who doesn’t know many words.

“I like how I look.”

Or maybe he’s just worried I don’t like him anymore.

“I like how you look, too,” I say, and he nods once. Twice.

I made him worry I didn’t like him anymore.

I’m such a shit … whatever I am. I went across the ocean for him and he still thinks I don’t like how he looks.

He’s such a stupid fishboy.

It’s starting to get dark again, so I set aside the letter and start to stand up. I don’t stay into the night since the sun rises early enough here that I can just come in the morning. I need to rewrite the letter anyway.

“Do you love me?” Teeth asks me just as I’m rolling the leg of my pants back down.

I look up so fast I lose my balance and fall right into the water, soaking my clothes and my letter so completely I can’t read what I’ve written anymore.

 -

I take up a job on one of the farms on the island. The owners are getting on in their years and they want someone young and strong enough to help them with the fields and the animals. I don’t think I qualify in the strength department, but the man tells me I’ll get there in time with the work I’ll be doing. I try not to think about how I could be going to college instead of working on a farm in the middle of nowhere, shoveling shit and putting it on the plants I’ll be eating later in the day. I learn a lot from the couple, especially the wife when she’s helping me with the goats.

The potatoes are magic. I can’t distinguish their magic from the magic of the fish, but she tells me they’re like that because of a famine.

I don’t ask her for details. I don’t need to know them. I know the famine she’s talking about. I don’t need to know the details.

I meet Teeth every day. The days I don’t work he gets all to himself, and the days I do work he gets me on my lunch breaks and after I finish for the day. He uses most of the time asking questions I haven’t heard since Dylan was young and asking everything he could think of, most of them about my work with the animals and the plants and what happened after he left. He doesn’t ask about the fish, and I don’t bring it up. It’s a sore spot. I know he misses them. I miss my family, too.

But I know I won’t be leaving any time soon.

I can’t.

“Make the sheep sound again,” Teeth says, splashing me. I splash him back.

“No, I’m not your toy. Go swim over there and listen to them.”

“I don’t want to.” So he doesn’t. He splashes me a few more times and I ignore the way I shiver from cold and from him. Am I ever going to be less easy?

I reach out my hand to stop his assault and he lets me, his webbed fingers immediately trying to curl into mine. It doesn’t work, so he squishes them together and wraps them around two of mine.

“I like that you’re here,” he says, all quiet, like he’s embarrassed to admit it. It’s not the first time he’s told me, but it always does shit to my stomach and heart when he does. Any regret I have for doing this vanishes as soon as he says the words.

Maybe I do love him. Why else would I have scoured the ocean for him?

Is this what sailors do for their fish?

The stories were right all along.

Teeth is looking up at me now, his fingers gripping my two like I’ll float away if he doesn’t hold them as tight as he can. A wave of guilt hits me, stuns me, and I don’t know where it comes from. It’s gone a moment later, but I’m left reeling from the feeling. My other hand grips the edge of the dock hard enough that I know I’ll have splinters when I remove it.

“Rudy?”

I move, pulling my feet out from the water and onto the wood of the dock, wetting both it and the bottom on my pants, and I lean with the leverage the position gives me. The hand Teeth has a hold on pulls him up easily with the buoyancy of the water to help, and I kiss him.

Don’t ask me where that came from. I don’t know where that came from. But I’m kissing him.

He tastes like salt and cold and ocean and wet. His different teeth scrape my bottom lip. He didn’t close his mouth all the way. This is the weirdest kiss I’ve ever had.

When I pull back, he’s staring at me.

“Sorry,” I say. “Sorry.”

Teeth blinks. It’s the only movement I see him doing, so I’m caught completely unaware when he pulls my fingers hard and I dive into the water head-first. The cold shocks me, I don’t flail or kick or swim. I can’t think. I can’t feel.

It’s cold cold cold everywhere.

I can’t think. I can’t feel.

Then I can. Then there are hands on my shoulders, holding me under. Keeping me anchored. There’s hair brushing my face that’s not mine, and then there are cold, salty lips pressing against me. Against my cheek. Against my lips.

I can’t think of anything else. I can’t feel anything else.

And then I’m free.

“That was so gross,” Teeth says once he’s pulled me back to the surface and I’m gulping down the air I didn’t want to need. I look up through the hair that’s plastered to my face to see him smiling at me with those weird, new teeth. “Can we do it again?”

I tell him we can, and we do. And we do, and we do, and we do some more.

And I feel more complete than I ever have in my life.

And I know I’ll never be easy for anyone else again.


End file.
